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Season's readings: writers and politicians pick the best reads of 2008

Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieSet during and after the Lebanese civil war, Rawi Hage's extraordinary De Niro's Game (Old Street) is about the bravado and betrayal of two friends. Hage bends the English language to his will, mixes poetry and history, and never forgets the humanity of his characters. José Eduardo Agualusa's The Book of Chameleons, translated by Daniel Hahn (Arcadia), is told from the point of view of a gecko, but there is nothing gimmicky in this beautiful book about an Angolan albino who invents alternate pasts for his clients. It is a grown-up story about memory, about the reinvention of the past, about a country getting to know itself again, and told in such exquisite language that I wished I could have read it in the original Portuguese.Monica AliI loved Sebastian Faulks's Engleby (Vintage), which contains the best and funniest description of a dinner party I have ever read. Joseph O'Neill's Netherland (Fourth Estate) is so beautifully written I immediately bought a couple more copies to give to friends. Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader (Profile) would make a perfect stocking filler for just about anyone. Any fans of The Wire suffering withdrawal symptoms should load up on Richard Price (one of the show's writers), starting with Clockers and including his recent offering, Lush Life (Bloomsbury).Tariq AliI was much impressed by two debut novels by south Asian writers who, unlike many local counterparts, write about things that matter. Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Cape) is a surreal thriller dealing with the assassination of a Pakistani military dictator. At times incredibly funny, it also, like a Buñuel film, captures the sinister side of life. Tahmima Anam's The Golden Age (John Murray) explores the painful birth-pangs of Bangladesh through the eyes of a family wrecked by the war.Ronald Fraser's magisterial history Napoleon's Accursed War (Verso) is a brilliant view from below of the popular Spanish resistance to French invasion, in what the insular Brits still call the Peninsular war, when the term "guerrilla" came into common currency. One of the great epics of the 19th century, properly recovered for the first time by Fraser in all its ambiguities and tragedies, along with its popular heroism, it's continuously moving, without a trace of sentimentality.Sebastian BarryThere is a very special sort of gratitude you can feel for a book so formidably well written that it has you anxious to get back to it and pining a little to be away from it, and one such book for me was Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherland. I read it in proof, when a book is strangely innocent and even vulnerable I suppose, and when for a brief and possibly foolish moment you can feel that you are the only reader. But as it turned out, the rest of the planet felt the same about it, hurrah. I also admired greatly the achievement of two Irish books, Disguise by Hugo Hamilton (Fourth Estate) and Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden (Faber). The Australian master Alex Miller published a book of sober beauty called Landscape of Farewell (Allen & Unwin), and in Canada Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is another novel of gratitude-inspiring prose. Jonathan BateJG Ballard's memoir, Miracles of Life (Fourth Estate), is a miracle of prose and of modesty. Second, an audiobook. Poetry needs to be heard aloud. By no means all poets are their own best readers, but Ted Hughes was. The British Library double CD The Spoken Word - Ted Hughes: Poems and Short Stories offers a treasure trove of BBC recordings from throughout his career. Most literary reputations nosedive in the first decade after death; that of Hughes has rightly soared.William BoydThe most original novel I read in 2008 was Gordon Burn's Born Yesterday (Faber). It is a highly sophisticated take on the news that was served up to us by the media in 2007. Burn's great gift is to make us see these events - that we were all very aware of - anew, through the filter of his fiction. No one has written more shrewdly and knowingly about popular newspaper culture than Burn, but with this novel he taps into something more profound and sinister.The most original novel of 1842, Nicolai Gogol's Dead Souls, has achieved a magnificent rebirth in 2008 through Donald Rayfield's superb new translation (The Garnett Press). Rayfield's translation is one that Vladimir Nabokov would unreservedly admire and is accompanied by dozens of superb, hitherto unseen illustrations by Marc Chagall. A big, beautiful book and a mould-breaking classic reinvigorated.Gordon BrownOne book I've been recommending to friends and colleagues lately is Tony Badger's new book on Roosevelt, FDR: The First 100 Days (Hill & Wang). It's a classic example of how a work of history can illuminate the issues we're dealing with today. What it brings out with such clarity is how Roosevelt, faced with an economic crisis of unprecedented severity, was prepared to put aside conventional policy approaches and, instead, had the courage to innovate and improvise to see what would work. The imagination and humanity at the heart of some of the great New Deal innovations - such as the Tennessee Valley Authority or the Civilian Conservation Corps - changed American politics for ever, and shaped the future of progressive politics across the world. At the same time, this book illustrates FDR's skills as a communicator and a political operator, which earned him the public support and political space he needed for his programme to succeed. It's a brilliantly written, compelling and moving portrait of the man, and it's another outstanding example of how British historians add so much to the field of American history.AS ByattOne biography: Jackie Wullschlager's endlessly absorbing account of Chagall and European life, wars, arts and ideologies (Chagall: Love and Exile, Allen Lane). I still don't love Chagall, but every page of this tale is enthralling, gripping and strange. Three novels. Philip Hensher's The Northern Clemency (Fourth Estate), about Sheffield in the Thatcher years. Hensher understands people and he understands politics. He understands the wise, the mean and the absurd. Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog (Chatto & Windus), which is one of the best-written books I've read for years. She writes with clarity and wit and thoughtfulness. And Nadeem Aslam's powerful Afghanistan novel The Wasted Vigil (Faber). This book is terrifying. It is also tragic and beautifully written, and changes the reader.Carmen CallilI have spent many happy hours reading So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald (Fourth Estate). Until a biography of this genius comes along, we have these letters, so ironic, idiosyncratic and beautiful. Because her letters are full of the stuff of every day and because her life straddled the last century (she died in 2000), her correspondence presents both a public and private portrait of an age. And every letter made me think: if Jane Austen had been permitted to live a century or two later, had lived in England through two world wars and had been allowed to take part in the ups and downs of domestic and literary life, she would have been just like Penelope Fitzgerald. Alastair CampbellI missed Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamish Hamilton) when it came out in hardback, but picked up the paperback at City airport a few months ago. It was one of those rare occasions when I wanted the flight to be longer so I did not have to stop reading. The narrative device - the entire novel is just one side of a conversation between two strangers in a Lahore café - could have been very limiting. But it is the perfect vehicle for a beautifully written story that builds in intensity to a climax that has you thinking long after the book is closed. Jonathan CoeSebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture (Faber) deserved all the attention it got, and more. Much has been written about the beauty of Barry's prose, but what really impressed me about this novel was its exquisite plotting, the way it threw a brilliantly calculated curve ball at the reader in its closing pages, and then finished with a satisfying click. I also loved Andrew Crumey's Sputnik Caledonia (Picador), the most impressive achievement yet from a still undervalued writer: in its combination of dystopian science fiction with warm but unsentimental childhood memoir, it struck me as being firmly in the tradition of - and worthy of comparison with - Alasdair Gray's Lanark. Talking of Gray, he was lucky this year to find a first-rate biographer in Rodge Glass, whose Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography (Bloomsbury) is a thorough, loving portrait of the artist as quirky genius.Margaret DrabbleDavid Lodge's Deaf Sentence (Harvill Secker) is a touching and humane treatment of deafness, disability and ageing, at once sad and stoic and intermittently witty, and, as always with Lodge, it is readable and accessible: a fine addition to his oeuvre. Adam Mars-Jones's remarkable novel Pilcrow (Faber) is also about disability, written with bravura and an extraordinary and inexplicable joyfulness. Ma Jian's Beijing Coma, translated by Flora Drew (Chatto & Windus), is almost unremittingly tragic, and made me feel quite ill, but was well worth the effort - bravely published, bravely translated, a grim and important novel about a crisis in world history.Dave EggersDexter Filkins's The Forever War (Bodley Head) is the best piece of war journalism I've ever read. He paints a portrait of war that is so nuanced, so filled with absurdities and heartbreak and unexpected heroes and villains, that it makes most of what we see and hear about Iraq and Afghanistan seem shrill and two-dimensional by comparison. And yet, as tragic as the events he describes are, the book manages to be a thing of towering beauty.Anne EnrightIt is hard to think of someone better suited to the task of interviewing Seamus Heaney than Dennis O'Driscoll, who is himself a poet of great tact and rigour. Stepping Stones (Faber) is a deeply nourishing book in which Heaney remains as completely open and entirely elusive as he has always been. Helen Garner was my favourite discovery of the year, though she has been annoying her native Australia for a long time now. She has a voice of great honesty and energy, and The Spare Room (Canongate), which is about a friend's inconvenient illness, manages to be both compassionate and cross at the same time. I also loved How Shall I Tell the Dog? (Profile), a series of letters from Miles Kington to his (and my) wonderful agent Gill Coleridge, in which he pitches ideas for books about dying - which was, in fact, what he was doing at the time. This is such a classy, funny book. What a great, great way to go. Richard FordA Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945 by Vasily Grossman, translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vonigradova (Pimlico) - by the author of the astonishing (and epic) novel Life and Fate. These are Grossman's raw yet eloquent cables, sent to the Red Star, as the Nazis pushed savagely into, and then were forced (as savagely) out of, the Soviet Union, along the great eastern front that stretched almost from Moscow to the Black Sea. Writing about war would seem, by definition, not to be inspiring. But this is.Molly Fox's Birthday is an old-fashioned (seeming) novel, about a bountiful subject - our human character and our need to imagine it rather than assume it. Deirdre Madden's prose is crystalline, understated, apparently effortless and artfully suitable. She really does not remind me of anybody I've read before. And yet, like other formidable writers - Mavis Gallant, Margaret Atwood, even Elizabeth Bowen come to mind - she is after something intrinsic and riddling but essential in us all, something that probably doesn't exist until we've read every word this book contains. It is ambitious work. Madden is a first-rate novelist.? Season's readings (next): recommendations from Antonia Fraser to Jackie KayBest books of the yearBest booksFictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Michael Billington on what TS Eliot's complex plays did for the theatre

Is there a dramatist currently less fashionable than TS Eliot? The verse-drama revival he so ardently championed bit the dust. His high Anglicanism is now a minority taste. Even the drawing-room settings he used as a spiritual battleground seem redolent of a lost world. The ultimate irony is that Eliot achieved the theatrical breakthrough he sought only with Cats: a musical that, at the last count, had been seen by over 50 million people worldwide; you could call it Old Possum's posthumous revenge. Next week, the Donmar Warehouse in London is bucking the trend with a two-month Eliot festival. It will include a revival of The Family Reunion, readings of Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party, and a performance of Four Quartets complemented by music from Beethoven. Time will tell whether this will be enough to restore Eliot's theatrical fortunes. I wouldn't bet on it: we live in an age of peculiar theatrical narcissism. We expect drama to conform to our own politically correct concerns; with a few shining exceptions, theatres now show a deep incuriosity about the past. Even Shaw has had to battle against decades of neglect. Eliot is a more complex case, and I would readily concede many of the arguments against him. His constant emphasis on contrition and self-denial becomes oppressive. Just as Eliot's religiousness can subside into misanthropy, so his politics can descend into snobbery. And, in attempting to pour both Greek myth and dramatic poetry into an acceptable West End form, he can be said to have sacrificed two babies with the bath water. Even he acknowledged, a propos The Cocktail Party, that "every step in simplification brings me nearer to Frederick Lonsdale", a creator of popular boulevard divertissements. Yet, for all that, I still believe Eliot deserves a second look. I am sorry that the Donmar season hasn't found room for Sweeney Agonistes, Eliot's most daring theatrical experiment. Billed as "fragments of an Aristophanic melodrama", it shows death intruding on a party hosted by two good-time girls. Written in a jazzy, freeform style that, shortly after Eliot's death, was given a brilliant accompanying score by John Dankworth, it anticipates many of the discoveries of postwar drama. In its use of repetition, its orchestration of demotic speech, and its mixture of comedy and menace, it clearly had an influence on Harold Pinter. Moreover, as Kenneth Tynan shrewdly noted, it articulates one of Eliot's key themes: an obsessive guilt often connected with the death of a woman. As Sweeney himself at one point cries: I knew a man once did a girl in. Any man might do a girl in Any man has to, needs to, wants to Once in a lifetime, do a girl in. Sweeney was never completed, but it provides a matrix for Eliot's imaginative development. It also suggests a second reason for looking closely at his stage work. Drama is inevitably a form of self-revelation, and Eliot's plays, in their constant emphasis on the need to expiate past sins, in their portrait of the hollowness of public men, and even in their final acceptance of human love, tell us a lot about the poet himself. All Eliot's heroes are, significantly, harried and haunted by their pasts. It's a rule that applies to Becket in Murder in the Cathedral, Harry in The Family Reunion, pursued by the Furies to his family's ancestral home, and to Lord Claverton in The Elder Statesman who, in his declining years, is confronted by his youthful disregard for human life. Eliot's plays provide an extraordinary self-portrait culminating, towards the end of his life, in an achieved absolution. People often pooh-pooh the biographical approach to art. Michael Hastings was derided for dredging up the story of Eliot's tormented first marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood in his play, Tom and Viv. But, while it is always dangerous to moralise about people's marriages, Hastings' play did some good in demolishing the myth of Eliot's impersonality. His marriage to Haigh-Wood led to emotional disorders on both sides, eventual separation and finally to her commitment to a psychiatric hospital. I'm not suggesting that this provides the clue to all Eliot's work; but it can hardly be an accident that his archetypal protagonist is a man who, whatever his public achievements, is wracked by a sense of guilt only relieved by self-abnegation. In Eliot's plays, sin and suffering are often accompanied by a sprightly comic sense. Everyone harps on the fact that The Cocktail Party ends with the off-stage crucifixion of Celia Coplestone, who has become a Christian missionary, on an African village anthill: an act of willed martyrdom that many people find repugnant. What is ignored is that the play also satirises the small talk of prattling partygoers and reminiscences about unseen figures, in a way that Pinter brilliantly extended in the Hirst-Spooner second act in No Man's Land. I would argue that Eliot's gift for self-revelation and social comedy only fully emerges in his two totally ignored final plays: The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958). I would happily sacrifice yet another evening sitting in some chilly church listening to actors worthily intoning Murder in the Cathedral for the odd revival of these two forgotten plays. The Confidential Clerk is a rivetingly bizarre play about parents seeking children and children seeking parents. It is also filled with countless echoes: of Euripides's Ion, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Shaw's Misalliance, and Gilbert and Sullivan's HMS Pinafore. What gives the play extra-curricular fascination, however, is how much it tells us about Eliot. Ultimately this is about the compromises by which people live, and the shadow-like nature of our professional lives. When Sir Claude Mulhammer, a successful financier who yearns to become a potter, talks of "a consuming passion to do something for which one lacks the capacity", one wonders if Eliot is referring to his own desire to become a popular dramatist. But the play is also about the universal search for some transcendent experience: what Mulhammer calls "an agonising ecstasy that makes life bearable". Colby, his presumed son, finds it in religion; Sir Claude, in pottery. When Eliot wrote The Elder Statesman, he had exorcised many of his demons by marrying his second wife, Valerie. Accordingly, he creates a hero, Lord Claverton, who banishes the spectres from his past. Achieving reconciliation with his two children, the hero finally drops all pretences and announces: "I have been brushed by the wing of happiness." Appearing in the same year as A Taste of Honey, and Chicken Soup With Barley, The Elder Statesman looked old-fashioned and enjoyed the shortest West End run of any of Eliot's plays; yet it remains his most human and touching work. All of which begs the real question: is Eliot a dramatic dodo, or does his work still have relevance in a predominantly secular age that has all but eradicated notions of sin, guilt and contrition? I wouldn't bank on a sudden Eliot boom, but I have a hunch that his plays have the capacity to address our search for something beyond mundane materiality. Our goals may be radically different from Eliot's, but poor Tom's not quite cold yet.From Mamet to Monty Python: Two verse-dramatists on what Eliot taught themGlyn Maxwell Eliot gave a speech at Harvard in 1950, in which he reported his experiences in writing and staging his three major plays. He considers what worked, what didn't, and why. There was no sign of the authoritative poet-critic. He was humble, candid, even drily comic.The speech was helpful, and meant to be - it was explicitly addressed to poets who might wish to write plays. Nearly all his concerns were formal: above all, to avoid the "Shakespearean echo" which sank the Romantics as playwrights. He started with what he called the "versification of Everyman" when writing Murder in the Cathedral, then switched to a long flexible line with a wandering caesura for all the others. The principle seemed to be: anything but pentameter. This was fair enough, given the Victorian artefact from which Eliot's poetry dissented - though the five-beat line emerged fit and well in the hands of his contemporary Edward Thomas: it's a more provisional, uncertain line, one that's nearer breath than poetry. I also think Eliot's Sweeney fragments stumbled on a more suggestive and durable form than did The Cocktail Party, and echo down, consciously or not, in everything from Pinter to Mamet to Monty Python.Peter OswaldVerse plays are not eligible for the TS Eliot prize, or any other poetry prize. Yet Eliot believed that poetry and drama were integral to each other: poetry dries up if it forgets its roots in sacred drama; drama becomes a slow-footed follower of the newspapers if it discards poetry. Just as he set out to tie up the cut ends of our culture in The Wasteland, so Eliot threw himself into reuniting poetry and drama. It was daunting. As he put it: "This verse drama is hard. You have to give your life to it." He felt he'd come to it too late.When I started writing verse drama, I felt that Eliot's dramatic enterprise was a heroic failure. What made things difficult was his disinclination for the obvious form - the iambic pentameter. To a modernist this option was locked shut, Pound having said that "the first step was to break the pentameter". But the blank verse form treads such a fine line between formal verse and ordinary speech: in my experience, it is salvation for the poet/playwright. Eliot did start something. Ted Hughes strove with the verse play all his life, culminating in his glorious Alcestis. This year saw the revival of the Canterbury festival, for which Murder in the Cathedral was commissioned; a play by Sebastian Barry was staged in the cathedral. Who knows, Eliot's fusion of poetry and drama may be realised in our lifetime.Glyn Maxwell's play Liberty recently completed a national tour. Peter Oswald's version of Schiller's Mary Stuart opens on Broadway next spring. His play Lisbon opens in the West End at the same time.The TS Eliot festival starts tomorrow and runs till January 17. Details: donmarwarehouse.comTS EliotTheatreguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Recording Of Ted Hughes To Be Played At University Of Exeter Event

Marking the tenth anniversary of Ted Hughes' death, the University of Exeter will unveil a never-before-heard recording of the British poet talking to friend Leonard Baskin.

Bennett donates his life's work to the Bodleian library

The scholarly work of one of the world's most famous libraries keeps being interrupted by cackles of laughter, as staff in the Bodleian at Oxford University get to grips with their latest treasure: a free gift of Alan Bennett's entire archive.While other writers or their heirs have made fortunes selling archives - only this week the British Library announced the £500,000 purchase of the papers of the late poet Ted Hughes - Bennett, one of the best-loved writers in English, is giving his archive out of affection for Oxford and in passionate defence of free state-funded education. It includes his manuscripts, diaries, letters and, on his death, all remaining papers and his working library, including hundreds of inscribed first editions of his own and other books."I really feel that Oxford is where I was educated and where I belong, and that if Bodley would like them, then they should have them," Bennett told the Guardian. "It sounds rather grand to say I can afford to, but libraries in England anyway are not well-endowed; they don't have much money. Me and my partner, we're relatively well off, and so I felt I didn't really want to take money for them."To say the Bodleian would like them is a serious understatement. Sarah Brown, the library's American director, said: "I'm absolutely thrilled about Bennett's papers and his message. His gift is inspirational.""We keep pinching ourselves, we still can't really believe it," said Richard Ovenden, associate director of the library, his desk covered in sheets neatly typed on the ancient manual typewriter Bennett bought for a few pounds from Age Concern in Settle, and then corrected, scored out, annotated and amplified in a blizzard of pencil and red, green purple and black ink. "Actually, that's a point - we must get that typewriter."Library staff have started catalogueing 30 years of diaries, of which extracts became a bestseller, and various drafts of The Madness of George III, which became the Oscar-winning movie partly filmed in the Bodleian. They also have the script of The History Boys, which won awards as stage play and film. Also included is his first great stage success, Forty Years On, which ran for more than a year in London from 1968, starring Sir John Gielgud: the title page reveals it could have been called Speak for England, Albert.Bennett was originally prompted by a former Bodleian chief librarian, David Vaizey, a friend since they met as undergraduates, and said yesterday that he saw the gift as a debt repaid."I was educated free right from the start. I was educated free in Leeds where I went to a state school, and then I got a scholarship to Exeter College Oxford, and so at no point did my parents or me have to pay anything for my education. "One didn't have much money, but one never really gave money a thought because you had just about enough to be going on with. Now that's a situation that students today can only dream of, really."In that sense giving the manuscripts to Bodley - it sounds rather pious - is a kind of small recompense for what I was given. And not merely given by Oxford, I also feel I was given it by the state, and the state isn't something that people would normally thank or think well of and hence the phrase 'the nanny state'. "I was nannied in the sense that everything was paid for, the Leeds education committee gave me a scholarship and then I had another scholarship later on: now if that's being nannied, I'm all for it."Oxford has recently led the demand for the elite universities to charge massive top-up fees: Bennett drew a firm distinction between his support for the library he loves and the university administration."I've differed from the university on other things, on their soliciting money from Rupert Murdoch, for instance. But the library is something separate, and however well-endowed the Bodleian is, it's like other libraries; it's strapped for cash, so I don't really think that applies. The philosophy of the library and the philosophy of the university are probably not the same."Already Ovenden and Chris Fletcher, head of western manuscripts, have collected a mass of papers, sorted for them into 100 box files in Bennett's north London home. They accepted a cup of tea, put them in the car and drove off, quivering with excitement. "I'm actually quite glad to see the back of it," Bennett said.In the archive? Unpublished manuscripts, including School Farce, with his note "written while waiting for Forty Years On to be put on, not published or (thankfully) produced"? The script for The Vicar's Wife, a proposed film with the late Ned Sherrin, which contains this exchange from the scene The Funeral Tea:"Could I have some rock salt, please?"Waitress: "What dear?"Minerva: "Rock salt. I don't want any salt with all the goodness taken out of it"? Manuscripts and drafts of all his stage, television and radio plays? Thirty consecutive years of almost entirely unpublished diaries - the rest will come to the library after his death - and manuscripts of autobiographical writing, including Writing Home and Untold Stories? Manuscripts of all his published novellas and short storiesAlan BennettUniversity of Oxfordguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Library acquires Hughes archives

Hundreds of unpublished poems, notebooks and letters by former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes are acquired by the British Library.

British Library's £500,000 Ted Hughes catch

Literary archive of former poet laureate's letters, journals and poetry drafts bought by institution

Massive Ted Hughes Archive Acquired By British Library

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath scholars will be making their way to the British Library after it announced the acquisition of a vast Ted Hughes archive spanning forty years.

Razia Iqbal

A look into Ted Hughes' school notebooks